Groups want to boost awareness of sex trafficking in N.C.

By Jason King
Assistant Communications Director

County health, social services and law enforcement personnel are in need of training to help identify victims of sexual exploitation and trafficking, members of the NCACC Justice and Public Safety Steering Committee were told during their meeting Jan. 14 in Raleigh.

Monika Johnson Hostler, executive director of the N.C. Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCCASA), told attendees that the statewide nonprofit was working through a federal grant to hold roughly 24 workshops across the state this year to help boost awareness among county employees of buzz words used by victims of sex trafficking and help law enforcement personnel recognize forced prostitution.

"We have to do a lot of work on the local level to identify these cases," said Margaret Henderson, associate director of the Public Intersection Project at the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Public Intersection Project is working with NCCASA to help raise awareness among local governments of sex trafficking.

Johnson Hostler said in early February that the workshops had been placed on hold after NCCASA learned that federal funding had been delayed. Dates and locations of the workshops will be published in CountyLines and on the NCACC's Calendar of Events Web page once they are scheduled.

According to Johnson Hostler, North Carolina is a state of interest to the federal government because it is vulnerable to sex trafficking due to the influx of immigrants and the I-95 corridor.

She added that some countries have had success cracking down on illegal sexual activity by "going after Johns in an aggressive manner." Some local law agencies in North Carolina – such as the Raleigh Police Department – have taken a more discreet approach by mailing letters to owners of automobiles that have been parked in the area of a known brothel.

Statewide, there is no uniform or consistent approach taken by local governments to combat sex trafficking, according to a paper written in 2008 by a student in UNC-CH's Master of Public Administration program. Steven Buter completed his "capstone" project on how local governments can identify and prepare for cases of sex trafficking.

In his paper, Buter did a comparative analysis between approaches to combat sex trafficking in North Carolina and in the Atlanta area, which Buter found to be successful because it relied heavily on local involvement. Buter's capstone paper is available online at www.sog.unc.edu/uncmpa/students/documents/StevenButer.pdf.

Steering committee members also heard an update on several current Criminal Justice Information Network (CJIN) projects and information sharing initiatives in local governments from CJIN Executive Director Gene Vardaman.

In particular, Vardaman mentioned Buncombe County's success with a consolidated 911 dispatch communications system that has improved the county's emergency response measures. The Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system includes GIS data and is in use by all emergency response departments. Vardaman said partnerships entered into by departments and entities made the system successful.

"The partnerships are really important," he said. "It's not the technology, it's the partnerships."

Durham County Board of Commissioners Vice Chair Ellen Reckhow said that during a recent trip to Philadelphia she saw Pennsylvania's Justice Network (JNET) in action. When someone was arrested and transported to jail, that person was held until their fingerprints were processed in JNET. The system quickly provided data on the suspect that law enforcement could view before making a decision on whether to release that person.

"It seems we are hamstrung with not being able to get data quickly," she said. "We have a long way to go."